A Fluid-filled Deformable Robot That Exhibits Spontaneous Switching among Versatile Spatio-temporal Oscillatory Patterns Inspired by True Slime Mold

摘要

This paper presents a fluid-filled modular robot inspired by a living coupled oscillator system constructed by plasmodium of true slime mold. The robot consists of homogeneous modules which are physically coupled with fluid-filled tubes. Exploiting this physical long distant interaction, the robot is capable to induce versatile oscillatory patterns and transitions between the rich oscillatory patterns in a fully decentralized manner. The simulation results obtained are expected to shed new light on design scheme of life-like robots to reproduce astoundingly versatile and adaptive behaviors.